The 2 Most Common Reasons Why Amazon Sellers Fail | Entrepreneur

There is a lot of good advice out there on how to launch your product on Amazon. Unfortunately, coming across the wrong advice will leave you with significant gaps in the products or services being sold to you.

If you’re a smaller business and don’t have unlimited budgets, or perhaps a solopreneur venturing into e-commerce for the first time, gaps and blind spots can bankrupt you.

As an Amazon consultant for over 10 years and CEO of an Amazon software company, I can tell you firsthand the three most common reasons why entrepreneurs fail and what you should do instead.

Related: Selling on Amazon? Take these 5 steps to unbalance your sales

1. Building an Amazon brand instead of a brand

A cursory Google and YouTube search would show you that the ticket to success on Amazon follows this formula:

1. Find products with high or medium demand and low competition.

2. Source products from manufacturers.

3. Get a trademark for your brand name.

4. Place your branding on the products.

5. Send the products to Amazon FBA fulfillment centers.

6. Optimize your listings.

7. Run PPC ads.

This sounds good in theory, but the nuance lies in the old saying about predicting not just the car, but also the traffic jam.

This results in a poor customer experience for Amazon customers as the Amazon marketplace is flooded with dozens to hundreds of the same products, all with different names because everyone has the same software telling them to source the same products.

That’s just part of the problem with this model.

Courses, articles, and YouTube videos that teach this model focus on “hacks” and shortcuts around listing optimization that also contribute to a poor customer experience for the Amazon customer.

They ignore the basics of selling and building a brand should focus on thatwhich includes:

This results in a flood of ugly listings that force customers to read 50 different ways to say “avocado cutting tool” instead of providing a top-notch customer experience.

So if you are an Amazon seller and want to provide your customers with a top experience and only the best products, how do you solve this problem? They make it harder for “private label” sellers to get to the top and be known to customers.

Amazon achieves this using its algorithm by prioritizing off-Amazon KPIs such as external traffic, the brand website, and more – as well as on-Amazon KPIs that inform Amazon about brand awareness, such as: B. Brand searches.

This eliminates our next category.

Related: New Amazon sellers need to avoid this big rookie mistake

2. Don’t focus on Amazon

On the surface, you are taught to view Amazon as a closed ecosystem and to only focus on what you can see on Amazon. This contains:

• keywords

• Reviews

• Price

• Images and A+ content

• videos

• bullet points

• PPC

From there, focus on pricing strategies, giveaways, back-end listing optimizations, and the other most common methods to quickly increase your Amazon sales. But that’s only half of it.

There are two pillars for success on Amazon:

1. On Amazon

2. From Amazon

Since you are taught to be an “Amazon brand” and not a “brand,” the off-Amazon component is ignored.

To be clear, if you sell an avocado cutting tool and want to appear at the top of searches on Amazon when someone searches for “avocado cutting tool,” you should focus on building your brand outside of Amazon to boost your rankings improve relevance on Amazon.

To build your brand on Amazon, Focus on these Recommended procedure:

• SEO for your brand website

• PR

• Brand mentions on social media

• Amazon influencer

• Be included in “Best” and “Top” lists of blogs and YouTube videos about what you sell

Amazon searches the Internet for information about the products sold on its marketplace and uses that information to prioritize what appears in search results and ads.

Also, I mentioned “branded searches” earlier – where customers go to Amazon and type your brand name into the search bar – and how this causes you to show up higher on non-branded searches like “avocado tool.” The list above shows how to increase brand awareness and thus drive brand-related searches.

Related: How to Get Your First 100 Sales on Amazon

OFF Amazon is also a great place to learn more about your customers, which can help with your imagery and copywriting. By spending more time where your customers are online, you’ll learn more about how your products relieve their pain, solve their problems, and fulfill their desires.

Amazon prioritizes and showcases strong, customer-recognized brands that deliver a great customer experience on their marketplace. You can be that if you focus on being a “brand” and not an “Amazon brand.”